Lack of centralized authority, service coordination sank DoD’s journey modernization effort

The Pentagon scrapped the $374 million program it labored on for years to switch its antiquated Defense Travel System (DTS) after discovering the brand new platform couldn’t reliably produce the monetary knowledge wanted to help a clear audit, a failure a authorities watchdog says stemmed from poor coordination with the navy companies and lack of centralized authority. 

The Defense Department started growing the system, referred to as MyTravel, in 2018. In 2022, it ordered the navy companies to start utilizing the platform because it moved towards lastly retiring DTS. But lower than a 12 months later, officers abruptly reversed course, abandoning MyTravel and returning to the legacy DTS.

In a report requested by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee after the division abruptly canceled the large modernization effort, the Government Accountability Office discovered that DoD didn’t interact with the navy companies to know what they wanted from the journey system till after it went reside. By not involving the companies throughout the prototype stage, officers dropped sure options out there within the previous system, with out realizing how necessary they have been to customers till after the system deployment.

Specifically, the companies utilizing MyTravel needed to manually alter monetary transactions as a result of their monetary administration IT techniques couldn’t routinely course of these adjustments.

“The new system didn’t actually meet a bunch of requirements that were needed…so when DoD realized that the data coming out of the new system wouldn’t produce the data that was needed without a bunch of manual adjustments, that was part of the reason it decided to abandon the process,” Vijay D’Souza, GAO’s director of data know-how and cybersecurity, instructed Federal News Network.

“One would argue that this shouldn’t have been a surprise, and DoD should have recognized it sooner in the process,” he added.

GAO additionally discovered that the trouble to advertise MyTravel was decentralized and given to the person companies, which restricted adoption and buy-in throughout the workforce. The lack of a single authority that will handle system adjustments and push by the required coverage adjustments additional hindered the trouble, leaving the Pentagon unable to shortly reply and adapt when basic flaws began to emerge.

“You didn’t have a central cheerleader for this, and you didn’t have a central manager or decision maker who could make tough decisions. For example, this issue about producing clean audit data — not having that centralized authority didn’t allow DoD to rapidly adapt to that issue that was identified,” D’Souza stated. 

Now that the Defense Department is sticking with DTS, GAO desires to make it possible for DoD has realized from its errors. D’Souza stated the division has made enhancements in management and established a extra centralized authority for the DTS modernization effort. That authority, nevertheless, has not but been formally permitted as a consequence of personnel adjustments on the beneath secretary stage.

The division has additionally made enhancements to the necessities administration course of — however GAO has discovered a scarcity of sure documentation and emphasis on tracing system necessities again to customers.

“We evaluate countless DoD systems every year, and the majority of the systems we look at have significant cost and schedule changes year after year, and part of what we’ve asked DoD, and they agree, is they need to do a better job on these things, a better job on tracking requirements, better job on setting clear dates and holding folks accountable to achieving those dates,” D’Souza stated. 

Reverting to the previous system

The division’s efforts to switch its growing older DTS date again to at the least 2015. In 2019, GAO discovered that DTS was answerable for practically $1 billion in improper funds from fiscal 2016 by 2018. But as of 2022, the improper fee fee remained excessive. There have been additionally numerous options missing from the system.

D’Souza stated that the division is “paying more attention to the issue of improper payments” and that GAO has “identified financial benefits that DoD has realized more generally from implementing better tools to stop improper payments.” 

The division has taken an incremental method to modernizing DTS — proper now, it’s utilizing a comparatively small modernization price range whereas growing a six-year modernization plan that will help a broader overhaul starting in fiscal 2027.

The conversations across the six-year modernization plan began proper after the division determined to tug MyTravel, however the plan has but to be finalized.

“It’s sort of par for the course. We often find that DoD takes several years to pull together a plan. And I think DoD is a large organization. It’s decentralized. There’s a lot of layers of approval, so some of that does take a long time. I would say that taking such a long time to pull a plan together is a little problematic, because by the time you’ve made the plan, things have changed. We have often pushed the idea to come up with quicker plans that it’s able to revise more rapidly,” D’Souza stated.

If you wish to contact this reporter about latest adjustments within the federal authorities, please e mail anastasia.obis@federalnewsnetwork.com or attain out on Signal at (301) 830-2747.

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